"Our original plan for 19 April has been canceled because too many people are aware of it and the situation is chaotic," wrote a group called "Revenge of the Flame," according to a translation posted on the Dark Visitor Blog. "At an unspecified date in the near future, we will launch the attack."

Pro-China hackers had called for the attack in protest of the news network's coverage of Tibet, which they believe has been overly critical of China. Participants had been instructed to flood CNN's Web site with Internet traffic in hopes of knocking it offline, something known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.

Some had begun hitting the site ahead of the April 19 attack date.

On Friday CNN reported that it had been attacked Thursday causing the site "to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia." The net effect of the attack was "imperceptible," CNN said.

Network monitoring company Arbor Networks observed that www3.cnn.com was hit with a minor 14-MB-per-second attack that lasted about 21 minutes, according to Danny McPherson, the company's chief research officer.

Copyright 2017 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.